Two items related to peer review and electronic means of communication showed up on blogs today. First, via Inside Higher Ed, a piece in Nature entitled “Trial by Twitter” on how electronic publication, blogging and Twitter are leading to scholarly publications getting discussed much more quickly and intensely than was previously typical in some disciplines.
And at Pharyngula, P. Z. Myers points out that young-earth creationist materials are being included in Google Scholar results. Obviously unless that changes, Google Scholar will no longer have any more academic value than ordinary Google – and will be worse in its misleading searchers to believe that young-earth creationism has some scholarly merit. There’s a petition to get this changed, but who knows what will actually happen. But for those of us placing increasing focus on information literacy, this illustrates both the challenges and the necessity of training students with such skills.Finally, in searching for an image to go along with this post, I found this site which not only discusses major ways that people have related science and religion, but provides cartoons and images illustrating each one. Some are particularly amusing.
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